Leadership

I came across Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson's work on empathetic leadership, which shows that organizations with higher psychological safety perform better on almost every metric, from innovation to revenue. 

We used a 'How psychologically safe is your organization?' matrix to show that this is not about creating an 'anything goes' environment. It's about minimizing anxiety and using empathy and respect, not fear, to motivate.

The matrix shows how 'apathy zones' can develop, often characterized by a 'dangerous silence' when people have learnt that speaking up, even about serious risks, leads to ridicule or retribution. 

There's also the 'comfort zone' which is slightly more benign but only in the short term as sweeping issues under the carpet doesn't work forever. Issues have to be faced and psychological safety isn't about 'being nice'. I think we can all probably recognise the 'anxiety zone' of the blame culture, where internal politics becomes the job. 

Like most people, I've worked for organizations at all points on the matrix during my career and sometimes a large organization contains different zones within it. Getting to the ideal state of openness and high performance is inevitably a work in progress.